Latest Update From Zambia

The Covenant College Zambia Trust AGM has come and gone. It began formally on Thursday evening and continued until Saturday concluding about 9.50am. Friday was a particularly long day beginning at 7.30am and not finishing until after 9.30pm. Our General Assembly sessions can be long and uncomfortable sitting for hours on church pews, but the seats used here are doubly uncomfortable. At least at the Assembly one can sit on a pew with a cushion and add another if required, but there are no such luxuries here!

Representatives of the College, the Farm and the Children's Education Ministries, each met with selected Trustees and highlighted important factors in their respective ministries reports. Then followed a time when the Trustees reported the outcome of their meeting to all the Trustees.

It was good to catch up with the others Trustees and to discuss the wide ranging and full agenda. A number of important decisions were made and details of them will follow when appropriate.

On Sunday I attended worship at the Confession Church Zambia, Petauke, with the Lachman family. The order of service is broadly along the pattern of the Dutch Reformed Church. This congregation is a church plant from a church in South Africa and was started by a missionary, the Rev Charles Zulu, who is also one of the full-time lecturers at Covenant College. The current pastor is Musonda Mwenda, a former college graduate, but Mr. Zulu does some of the preaching and has pastoral oversight of this congregation among others. Normally about 16 attend worship, however their number was much depleted for various reasons with only around six locals attending. He preached from Galatians 5 choosing verses 26 + 28 as his text.

They meet in a school classroom in Petauke along with around six others churches around the same time. All the time I was there at least one noisy Pentecostal church did not stop singing and playing loud amplified music during the total duration of Mr. Zulu's service.

I was invited to give a word of encouragement to the brethren towards the close of the service and I informed them that their setting and paucity of numbers reminds me of my congregation at Aultbea.

Today around one thousand persons are expected to attend the Covenant College Farm's Open Day. Last year over 600 hundred attended and the organisers hope to exceed that number this year. Many local and influential people have indicated they will attend where the positives benefits of farming God's way will be presented to them by Mr. Phil Bailey, Farm Ministry Tutor, and Mr. Jackson Kasola, Farm Manager, and their staff.

I expect to leave Covenant College today (Tuesday) around 1.00pm with Phil and travel for five hours to Lusaka to catch my flight at 11.50pm to Amsterdam and then onto Inverness.